photo: Ellen Gallagher by Nicole Bengiveno/New York TimesAmsterdam’s American Book Center had quite a sales table this August. On it I found After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art by Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott. Here is a passage which addresses a thought I’d been having about “quilt” as a container for personal narrative. In Heartney’s essay on Ellen Gallagher she writes:
“It has been a long time since the champions of modernism have been able to argue that narrative and content were the enemy of quality, as Clement Greenberg did in 1940 when he proselytized for an art whose purity was not defiled by reference to any external reality. In a similar vein, forty years later, Rosalind Krauss could still celebrate the widespread use of the gird by artists with the pronouncement “The grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, to hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” The grid, she added, “states the autonomy of the realm of art.”
But many artists today see supposedly neutral modernist formulas like minimalist geometry, the grid, and the archive as empty shells to be filled with subversive content. When Haim Steinbach equates art and commodity by placing high-end running shoes and lava lamps on shelves derived from the minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd, when Peter Halley takes Mondrian’s geometry and makes it reference electronic circuitry and prison bars, and when Charles Ray homogenizes and serializes the family unit, presenting all members, from father to baby, as elements of equal size, they all make a mockery of modernism’s formalist pretenses by using them for quite different purposes.”
